1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to document processing, and in particular identification and management of tasks associated with a document for the purposes of document editing, validation, and analysis.
2. Description of the Related Art
Numerous solutions have been proposed for automated document creation and review to reduce the workload on those personnel tasked with scrutinizing and validating documents. For instance, some tools automatically generate documents from brief answers entered in a questionnaire; the input information is used to populate a standard form document. This type of tool is suitable for documents that only require input of discrete, atomic items of information (such as names, addresses, asset or debt listings and the like), where the remaining document content is pre-written, and the interpretation of the document is less likely to be nuanced by the input information. Examples of such documents include loan applications and purchase orders.
Such automated document creation and review tools, however, are less suitable for “bespoke” documents in which much of the content is customized to reflect unique situations or relationships between parties. Examples of such bespoke documents can include prospectuses and other disclosure documents of different types in various commercial and industrial sectors, non-standard contracts, court pleadings, and even patent applications. Other computerized solutions have been proposed to automatically validate legal instruments and complex business documents through text analytics and other techniques to compare document content against predetermined text passages.
These solutions, generally, are intended to improve efficiency in the review and validation process by eliminating or reducing the need for human clerical or professional skill and judgment. While improved efficiency may be a desirable goal, these types of automated solutions are heavily reliant on proper advance preparation of a standard form document, or of a library of standard texts and a lexical analysis engine.